aelf
Ashen One
Round 10: 1568AD - 1697AD
The update is finally here (not that it's late
). Well, to be fair, I am updating at a rate of about once every 2.5 weeks, which doesn't sound too horrible 
We began the round preparing for a quick strike against Shaka. We split our stack into two as planned and reinforced those stacks with more cannons. Meanwhile, we continued researching Democracy.
A few turns into the round we got another GS at Edirne:
The Great Library continues to be useful. However, this one would lightbulb Scientific Method, which would render the wonder obsolete. We would have to do it eventually, but not so soon. Lightbulbing will stop being very effective anyway. He goes to sleep for now.
Soon, our war plans were executed:
Notice our small stack. We didn't need more per stack due to Shaka's technological disadvantage. Needless to say, his cities fell quickly. The first:
Sorry about the bad screenshot. I have no idea how it became like that and didn't notice till too late. Well, it gets the point across anyway...
At this time, we discovered Democracy, which proved to be a bigger boon than just enabling Emancipation:
And,
At this rate, we are proceeding with our catch-up game quite well. We researched Steam Power and Railroads next for machine guns and, err, railroads. The incredible boost in mobility would be very useful for defense and logistics, on top of the solid defenders that MGs are.
Meanwhile, the second Zulu city fell:
And we got another GG for our efforts:
He was posted to our HE city (Ankara) to be another GMI. I considered setting up a Military Academy, but decided that having experienced troops would be more useful and cost-effective than having more troops.
The last Zulu city in the south fell and was razed:
If you remember, I decided to raze it in the last update because it would be too exposed to Mongol attack and thus difficult to defend in the next war.
And, aptly enough, the next war was just round the corner:
That was sooner than I expected, but better he declare than us. That meant we had to keep our units in the south and couldn't go after Shaka's northern cities. It also meant massive WW carried over from the last war. Faced with a lot of unhappiness, I felt that we had to make the transition to Emancipation:
We also switched to Free Speech to take advantage of a 1 turn discount for changing 2 civics at the same time. This may seem ironic given that we're at war, but our unhappy cities could generally not take much drafting. And we had quite enough troops to fight off Khan anyway. Additional units could be slow-built.
Thankfully Shaka was willing to capitulate by then to save us some burden:
[continued in the next post]
The update is finally here (not that it's late
). Well, to be fair, I am updating at a rate of about once every 2.5 weeks, which doesn't sound too horrible We began the round preparing for a quick strike against Shaka. We split our stack into two as planned and reinforced those stacks with more cannons. Meanwhile, we continued researching Democracy.
A few turns into the round we got another GS at Edirne:
The Great Library continues to be useful. However, this one would lightbulb Scientific Method, which would render the wonder obsolete. We would have to do it eventually, but not so soon. Lightbulbing will stop being very effective anyway. He goes to sleep for now.
Soon, our war plans were executed:
Notice our small stack. We didn't need more per stack due to Shaka's technological disadvantage. Needless to say, his cities fell quickly. The first:
Sorry about the bad screenshot. I have no idea how it became like that and didn't notice till too late. Well, it gets the point across anyway...
At this time, we discovered Democracy, which proved to be a bigger boon than just enabling Emancipation:
And,
At this rate, we are proceeding with our catch-up game quite well. We researched Steam Power and Railroads next for machine guns and, err, railroads. The incredible boost in mobility would be very useful for defense and logistics, on top of the solid defenders that MGs are.
Meanwhile, the second Zulu city fell:
And we got another GG for our efforts:
He was posted to our HE city (Ankara) to be another GMI. I considered setting up a Military Academy, but decided that having experienced troops would be more useful and cost-effective than having more troops.
The last Zulu city in the south fell and was razed:
If you remember, I decided to raze it in the last update because it would be too exposed to Mongol attack and thus difficult to defend in the next war.
And, aptly enough, the next war was just round the corner:
That was sooner than I expected, but better he declare than us. That meant we had to keep our units in the south and couldn't go after Shaka's northern cities. It also meant massive WW carried over from the last war. Faced with a lot of unhappiness, I felt that we had to make the transition to Emancipation:
We also switched to Free Speech to take advantage of a 1 turn discount for changing 2 civics at the same time. This may seem ironic given that we're at war, but our unhappy cities could generally not take much drafting. And we had quite enough troops to fight off Khan anyway. Additional units could be slow-built.
Thankfully Shaka was willing to capitulate by then to save us some burden:
[continued in the next post]
